This vase was among eighty-nine pieces of Sèvres porcelain bequeathed with a collection especially rich in eighteenth-century French decorative art by John Jones in 1882. As the handbook to the Jones Collection stated in 1883: "Suddenly ... a collection has been given ... which contains the very objects so much to be desired, and, as it seemed a year ago, so hopeless of attainment." A military tailor who made his fortune during the Crimean War, Jones (1799-1882) started collecting seriously in the 1850s, sharing a taste for luxury objects of the ancien regime with aristocratic collectors such as the fourth marquess of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace (founders of London's Wallace Collection), John Bowes, and Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild.

John Jones bought a pair of similar Sèvres vases with a brilliant blue glaze. This rare (possibly unique) marbled version was bought at auction by Jones at the sale of Henry Hope, where it was described as 'veined marble' with no mention of it being made of Sèvres porcelain decorated to resemble marble. They were all based on a real marble vase (now in the J. Paul Getty Museum) that may have been owned by the art collector the duc de Choiseul, which may account for the vase name in the Sèvres factory records 'vase Choiseul'. The shape must have still been considered highly fashionable in 1769 when the English writer and collector Horace Walpole ordered the blue pair directly from the Sèvres factory. Prominently displayed at Walpole's "Gothick" style villa at Strawberry Hill (see cats.134 and 135), they were bought at the Strawberry Hill sale in 1842 (erroneously described as "Oriental") by John P. Beavan, and later passed to Jones. In Jones' overcrowded house at 95 Piccadilly this vase was displayed together with the blue pair in his dining room in front of the windows overlooking Green Park (see fig.41).

Immediately upon its acquisition, the Jones collection was placed on display in galleries newly painted for the occasion. The objects were arranged by type, colour and shape, with the porcelain in serried ranks of heavy wooden cases (see fig.42). According to the Museum's 1883 Jones collection handbook, "... it would have been impossible, as well as useless, to have retained ... any memorial of their old arrangement," indicating that various styles of display must have been debated at the Museum. When the Jones collection was reinstalled in 1922, objects and furniture were intermixed to give the suggestion of eighteenth-century period settings; this approach has been refined in two subsequent reinstallations of the collection (see figs.43 and 44).

Lit. South Kensington Museumm 1883a, no.232; South Kensington Museum, 1883b; Thorpe, 1962; Charleston and Bolingbroke, 1972; Sutton, 1972; Eriksen and de Bellaigue, 1987